Fortune finally has frowned on Harrah’s Cherokee Casino. Eleven years after opening, the casino has dealt its first layoffs, dropping employment from 1,800 to 1,700 after revenue slipped 8.5% last year.

Disaster strikes. Everyone pays because of the failures of policymakers. Major companies go down the tubes. Middle-class workers mutter about a bailout of rich fat cats living the high life. The meltdown on Wall Street? No. Try a meltdown of the market for home-owners insurance in North Carolina.

In the waning days of the Civil War, Union Gen. George Stoneman’s cavalry raided parts of the Piedmont. After plundering Salisbury and burning its military prison, the Yankees turned their attention to a railroad bridge over the Yadkin River near Spencer. More than 140 years later, a longer battle was waged over that property. But this time the hostilities were between historic preservationists and Atlanta developer Richard Combs, who wants to build a “racing country club” there.

First it was the faltering economy, then the birds, specifically nesting plovers, an imperiled species that prompted the closing of some popular Cape Hatteras National Seashore fishing beaches. Together, figures Carolyn McCormick, managing director of the Outer Banks Visitors Bureau, they cast a pall over tourism. Then came a real pall, a fire at Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge that wafted smoke over Eastern North Carolina.

Last summer, Raleigh-Durham International Airport was flying high. Its 243 daily departures in July represented a 9% increase from the previous year. Since then, it has lost altitude, giving back all it gained and then some. This July, RDU had just 219 daily departures, and some of those are scheduled to end soon.

Since 2005, you could have had the Land of the Sky “Any Way You Like It.” Now there’s “Appalachia Comin’ Atcha.” It’s branding season in the Blue Ridge, and the latest slogan-setter is a $20,000 video target- ing visitors with a familial interest in western North Carolina.

Gambling, proponents predicted, would be the biggest boon to western North Carolina since the other one — Daniel — crossed the Blue Ridge. Sin, critics cried, calling it the road to perdition when Harrah’s Cherokee Casino opened in 1998. However, the smart money now calls it the path to prosperity: A new report by Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians shows the casino has grossed $1.6 billion in 10 years. The Cherokees own the casino and, except for a management fee to the Las Vegas-based operator, pocket the profit, but the economic impact reaches beyond the Qualla Boundary, as the 56,000-acre Indian reservation is officially known.

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder. That also goes for value. Covering the landscape along a mountain road, trees are lovely to behold and create vistas that draw visitors — and their money — to western North Carolina. Thinned out, they provide prime habitat for many species of wildlife and a valuable source of timber. So the U.S. Forest Service plans to begin logging 212 acres south of Blowing Rock next year, despite the ill will the plan has reaped.

Even in the South, where the mythological is never very far from the real, the memory of the feudal county boss is but a scant echo of an earlier time. Ours is a modern society now, with all the trappings of democracy, economic equality and self-determination. We are the lords of our own lives, in a way that our forebears never were. What to make, then, of the influence and power two elderly men have wielded over a single suburban county in North Carolina?

While growing up in Statesboro, Ga., Tom DeLoach Jr. never saw a NASCAR race. He didn’t go to his first until 1986 as vice president of marketing for oil giant Mobil. “I said, ‘Wow, this is neat!’ Boom! The light came on: ‘I like this!’”